how to eat ice cream

"You know."

Two heads of dark hair swiveled to train golden eyes on the blue ones set in the determined face underneath the third.

"I think I figured out the problem with ice cream."

"There's a PROBLEM with ICE CREAM?" Xander exclaimed with an incredulous raise of his chocolate-covered-peanut-studded spoon out of the spiraling landscape of vanilla fudge. Rex, kitted out with something simultaneously much more and much less cosmopolitan (that is to say, full neapolitan, as a matter of fact), tacked on a decisive "You're joking."

But Evie, momentarily prim, just shook her head, eyes closed and round nose perked into the air. "I'm not. If I was joking, it would have been funny. The same doesn't always go for you two, you know."

"Hey!" (In tandem, of course.)

"But anyway. The problem is that it's frozen."

"Frozen? Of course it's frozen, that's why they call it" - here Rex dropped his own spoon and thrust his hands wide to emphasize - "ICE cream. Come on, Evie! Did you not get enough cookie dough pieces in yours today?"

She shook her head again. "Plenty - but thank you for asking, I suppose. Here, I'll show you."

Whimsically-patterned Mary Janes a-clop clop clopping on the floor, Evie pushed back her chair and jumped up to make her way to the fridge, snagging three matching plastic glasses from the drying rack as she went. "I think Mama said the milk's expiring anyway, so this is perfect," she added.

Maybe she was pretending not to struggle with the as-yet-half-full jug, or maybe she wasn't only pretending. If there had been an adult around, the boys might have been ushered into chivalry, but instead they just watched, quizzical, pushing limply at the decaying mounds of frozen dairy dessert and melting blobs of whipped cream covered in strings of chocolate sauce in their bowls.

"Well?"

Both heads jerked up, again.

"Do I look like I have three hands?"

A lazy grin tugged at the side of Xander's face. "If I squint, maybe..."

"Oh, shush! Now, here." With that, Evie scurried over to the kitchen table again, snatched up her bowl, and then crossed back to the fridge where the slab of formica next to it held the awaiting glances - this last with the smallest exasperated puff of air at her inexplicable forgetfulness.

"First the ice cream..." (A small spoonful, carefully dug out around a chunk of cookie dough and a shard of chocolate chip.) "...and then..." (A sip of milk, aimed straight to the back of the throat.)

This time, the horrified shout of "You're joking!" came altogether simultaneously from both Xander and Rex, and Evie's eyebrow, arched entirely too flexibly in proportion to its thickness, gave absolutely no cue as to what exactly she meant by it.

"That's ridiculous! You can't just put dairy with more dairy, that's like...that's like putting eggs on top of chicken!"

Such a statement earned Xander a pair of half-disgusted half-disappointed glances and accompanying distorted sets of lips. "Are you sure about that, Xander?" put in Rex uncertainly with a hand laid to the back of his head. Shrugging, Evie whispered to him, "I mean, I guess he would know - it's our dad who knows about agriculture, anyway."

Whether or not Xander was actually considering this choice piece of lore was neither nor there; he shook his head and said, "Fine. Maybe it's not that weird. But there's no way it's that good."

But Evie just shook her head for a third and final time and swept her arm towards the refrigerator in invitation. The boys mimicked her, one spoonful of the solid stuff to one sipful of the liquid, and then Rex cocked his head to the side and Xander wrinkled his nose, and all three shouted gaily,

"You're kidding!"